Something that I share with many other people I know, is a love of chocolate. I’m sure we all know that chocolate isn’t the healthiest of things to eat but it’s very nice and if we eat it in moderation, it’s not going to do us any real harm. The trouble with chocolate for most of us, I think, is that it is so nice it’s very difficult to eat it in moderation. I know that, if I open a bar of chocolate, break off a piece and eat it, I’ll immediately want another piece, and another, and another and, if I didn’t make a conscious effort not to, I’d eat the whole bar there and then. And I know that lots of other people have exactly the same problem with chocolate.
In that sense I, and lots of other people, could be called ‘chocoholics’. Actually, that’s a bit of a misnomer because the word chocoholic implies an addiction to chocolate but, according to research, there’s nothing in chocolate itself that’s addictive. It seems the problem with chocolate is the sugar that’s added to it, to milk chocolate especially, to enhance the flavour by taking away chocolate’s natural bitterness. The sugar, it seems, gives us a ‘sugar high’ when we eat chocolate and it’s that, coupled with the taste of the sweetened chocolate that makes us crave more of it. So whether it’s actually addictive or not, for lots of people, chocolate is certainly very ‘moreish’.
Another way of talking about chocolate would be to say it’s very tempting and, as Christians, temptation, and especially resisting temptation, is something we’re very much focussed on during Lent. So, if we wanted to give up chocolate for Lent, or perhaps cure ourselves of our ‘chocoholism’ more permanently, how would we go about it?
One way would be to simply not have any chocolate in the house; if we don’t have any chocolate, we can’t eat it. That would be, if you’ll pardon the pun, a quick, simple fix. But that would probably only be a short-term solution too. It would be OK if we were giving up chocolate for Lent, but if we wanted to give up or cut down our consumption of chocolate on a long-term basis, it probably wouldn’t be a practical way to do it. We’d be bound to come across chocolate somewhere at some time and then we’d have to face the temptation to eat some of this very moreish stuff. And that’s a problem lots of people do have with chocolate, me included. People tend not to crave chocolate when they don’t have any to hand, but when they do have it, they start to eat it, and then they want to eat it to excess. So, if we wanted to be cured of our chocoholism rather than just give up chocolate for Lent, we’d have to find a different way to do it than simply not having any chocolate in the house.
In the end, the only way we’d be able to stop eating chocolate or cut down on how much of it we ate, on a long-term basis, would be to build up the strength of character, the will power if you like, not to eat chocolate even when we do have it to hand. And that’s the solution to dealing with all temptations on a long-term basis; to be able to face temptation, to be in the presence of what tempts us, but to have the strength of character not to give in to temptation.
I think people often miss a very important point about temptation. Temptation is about wanting something that we shouldn’t have, or perhaps wanting to do something that we shouldn’t do. But there’s a big difference between wanting and having, wanting to do and doing. And the most dangerous temptations are those things we want and shouldn’t want but can have; the things we want to do and shouldn’t do but can do. To give an example. In recent days, more than one person has said to me that they’d like to shoot a certain politician, whose name I won’t mention, but it was the president of Russia. Christians shouldn’t want to do that, but it’s not a temptation to those who’ve said it to me because they can’t do it anyway. On the other hand, if those people had said to me, they’d like to shoot their next-door neighbour, that would be a temptation, and a very dangerous one, because it’s something they could do. So resisting temptation isn’t about not doing what we can’t do anyway, such as not eating chocolate when we don’t have any chocolate, it’s about not doing what we could do; it’s about not eating chocolate when we’re surrounded by it. This is one of the lessons we can learn from the story of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness.
We could interpret the temptations Jesus’ faced in certain ways so that they apply to us, but the temptations themselves really don’t. If we were hungry, we might look at a stone and wish it was bread, but we couldn’t possibly turn a stone into a loaf, so that wouldn’t be a temptation to us. But it was to Jesus because he could have turned the stones into loaves. And the stones were there, probably all around him, so it would have been a very real temptation to Jesus, one he had to face and resist.
We might be tempted by the prospect of power and authority, but we’re never going to rule the world, no human being, no matter how powerful has ever been able to do that. As we know, a few have tried over the years, but they’ve all failed. So the prospect of ruling the world in return for worshipping the devil isn’t a temptation to us because it’s a power we can never have. But it was a temptation to Jesus because he could have used his divine power for his own ends, to pursue his own glory rather than the will and the glory of his Father. So this temptation, which would be so ludicrous to us as to be no temptation at all, was a very real temptation to Jesus because it was a power he could have had.
And the final temptation Jesus faced, that of putting God to the test by throwing himself from the top of the temple is, again, not a temptation to us. Unfortunately, people very often are tempted to put others to the test, and they often succumb to that temptation. They succumb by using others as nothing more than a means to satisfy their own desires, or by taking others for granted, which is very often simply another way of saying that people have put their own desires above the needs of others, simply because they think they can, and can get away with doing that. But would any of us really consider throwing ourselves off the roof of St Marks’, or St Gabriel’s, to test whether God loves us or not? In the 40 plus years I’ve been an adult member of the Church, I’ve never met anyone who thought they could do something like that and get away with it. So this isn’t a temptation to us, but it was to Jesus. Jesus knew his mission was to fulfil the Scriptures, that’s why the devil tempted him by quoting the Scriptures. So Jesus knew that he could have thrown himself from the top of the temple in the absolute certainty that no harm would come to him. And so this was another temptation that Jesus had to face and resist.
When we think about temptation, we have to be clear about what we really mean. Are we talking about unachievable goals or hopes, things we’d very much want to have or do but which, in reality, we know we can’t? Because those are pipedreams, not temptations. Or are we talking about real temptations, things we’d very much like to have or do, that we know we shouldn’t want or do, but can or could have or do? It’s these things, real temptations and not pipedreams that we should be concerned about and that we need to resist.
But, when it comes to resisting real temptations, how do we know that we’re resisting them and not simply hiding from them? The only way we can know that, is if we actually face them, just as Jesus did during his 40 days in the wilderness.
In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God our Father may,
‘…lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
But we know from Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness that God can, and sometimes does, lead us into places and situations where we can be tempted. So what we’re really praying for here is first of all, that we won’t be tempted by what we find in the places and situations that God leads us into. And we’re praying too that, if we are tempted by what we find in those places and situations, we may be delivered, saved, from the evil of giving in to temptation and all the evil that may flow from that. If we look at these lines from the Lord’s Prayer in the light of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, we’re not praying to have temptations hidden from us by being spared from being led into places and situations where temptation occurs, because that wasn’t Jesus’ experience; he was led into the wilderness, the place of temptation, by God the Holy Spirit. We’re praying that if, in following where God leads us, we do find temptation, we may have the strength and the faith to act as Jesus did; the strength and faith to face up to temptation and resist it.
If we’re a chocoholic, we can hide from our chocoholism by avoiding contact with chocolate, by hiding from chocolate. But we’ll never know if we’ve freed ourselves from chocoholism unless we have chocolate in front of us, and don’t eat it, or at least can resist the temptation to eat it all in one go. And in the same way, we can try to hide from the temptations that we may find in the places into which God leads us. But the only way we can do that is by not going where God wants us to go, by trying to hide from God in effect, and as Christians, that’s not an option. As Christians we’re called to follow Christ and to go where God leads us and sometimes that means going into the place of temptation and facing up to what we find there and resisting. That may not be easy but it’s the only way to be sure that we really are able to resist temptation and that we’re following this example of Jesus.
Amen.
The Propers for the First Sunday of Lent can be found here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 